Watching me, watching you
Watchmen is unleashing a few too many inner nerds
Seeing as how my A.V. Club colleague Keith Phipps has already written a fine review of Watchmen—and considering that the Internet could really use more half-assed rambling about the film—I figured I’d take some time out of my busy day not to list the pros and cons of the number-one movie in America, but to list all the lame crap that happened to me the night I saw it. But first, a warning: There are NO SPOILERS WHATSOEVER in the blog below. That is, unless you're somehow unaware that a big, blue cock is one of the stars of the movie. In which case, please accept my apologies for ruining that for you.
1. I’ve been waiting to see Watchmen for, no shit, 20 years. I was in high school when the original Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons miniseries started coming out, long before it existed in graphic novel form. Speculation about a film version sprang up almost before the series had concluded, and the great Terry Gilliam was the first filmmaker seriously attached to it. The fumbling of the big-screen version of Watchmen over the years from Gilliam to Zack Snyder has been documented in excruciating detail, as has everything else about the project in all its forms. So I won’t pop that particular pimple all over you here. But I will say this: I went all the way down to the Continental on Watchmen’s opening night last Friday, sat my ass in one of those comfy stadium seats, and was utterly, glumly underwhelmed by the CliffsNotes-in-CGI version of the graphic novel. 'Nuff said. Really, you don’t want to get me started.
2. While sitting in my comfy stadium seat eating popcorn and watching the rest of the audience trickle in (yes, I showed up an hour early and wound up being third in line—pretty sweet, huh?), some dude with a huge gut and a goatee strutted into the theater wearing a smiley face T-shirt. As we all know by now—even those who haven’t seen the movie—the blood-spattered smiley face is the dominant motif of Watchmen. So why did this handsome fellow’s shirt bug the hell out of me? Because it wasn’t a real Watchmen shirt. It was one of those smiley-face-with-a-bullet-hole shirts, the kind you might see on some militia-loving survivalist while he suits up for a lively afternoon of shooting paintballs at his batshit crazy buddies in the woods. Seriously, wearing a bullet-hole-smiley-face T-shirt to the opening night of Watchmen is the equivalent of wearing a Winger T-shirt to an Ozzy concert.
3. Although Watchmen’s unrelenting exposure of Dr. Manhattan’s giant, neon-blue penis has been commented on endlessly—to the point where it’s become shorthand for the self-importance and borderline misogyny of the entire movie—there was a row of teenage boys sitting behind me Friday night who freaked out every time Billy Crudup’s Otter Pop showed up onscreen. “WOAH!!!” they yelled dude-ishly. “HEEHEEHEE!!!” they snickered nervously. Are we as a nation, as a culture, that sexually repressed? That latently homophobic? It really bummed me out. Then Silk Spectre took her shirt off, and at last we were all on the same page.
4. And finally: For the first time since high school, I wound up in a suburban Village Inn at 2 in the morning after a movie, geeking out with my dorky friends over shit like who's the raddest member of The X-Men*. Which, in turn, degenerated into a conversation about which team of The X-Men we were talking about. Which, in turn, degenerated into an argument about Angel versus Archangel. Which, in turn, degenerated into the realization that—no matter how old my friends and I grow—we never get any cooler. Which, in turn, made me very depressed. Depressed enough, even, to totally forget how depressingly disappointing the movie was I’d just watched.
*By the way, it was unanimous: Nightcrawler tied with Colossus. Duh.
